This HAS to be cleared up because this is a largely recurring argument, so I will deal with it specifically:
The Accusation:
Israel started the Six-Day War (i.e. an aggressive action)
The Accusers:
“In 1967 Israel started the Six Day War by launching an air attack on Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. Israel occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza and 1.5 million Arabs, mostly Palestinians, came under Israeli occupation. More than 300,000 Palestinians were forced to flee. Israel is still occupying the territories.” (Eva Bjoreng, secretary general of Norwegian People’s Aid, and Steinar Sorlie, secretary general of Norwegian Refugee Council)
The Reality:
Although Israel fired the first shot against Egypte–although not against Jordon–the war was begun by Egypt’s decision to close the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping and to order the removal of U.N. troops from the Sinai.
The Proof:
Although Israel fired the first shots, virtually everyone recognizes that Egypt, Syria, and Jordan started the war. The Illegal Egyptian decision to close the Straits of Tiran by military force was recognized by the international community to be an act of war. As Egyptian president Nasser himself boasted, “We knew the closing of the Gulf of Aqaba meant war with Israel…the objective will be Israel’s destruction.” The Egyptian commander of Sharm al-Shekh, the point of entry to the straits from which the Egyptians warned they would shoot at any Israeli ship that tried to pass through on the way to or from Eilat, acknowledged that “the closing of the straits was a declaration of war.” However, according to Nasser, the war was not to be over the Straits of Tiran but over Israel’s “existence.” Nor was Israel’s surrender contemplated. This, like the 1948 war, was planned to be a war of extermination.
Damascus Radio incited its listeners: “Arab masses, this is your day. Rush to the battlefield…Let them know that we shall hang the last imperialist soldier with the entrails of the last Zionist.” Hafiz al-assad ordered his Syrian soldiers to “strike the enemy’s civilian settlements, turn them into dust, pave the Arab roads with the skulls of Jews. Strike them without mercy.” He characterized the forthcoming attack on Israel as “a battle of annihilation.” The Voices of the Arabs in Cairo exhorted its listeners with similar incitements to see that “Israel is liquidated.” The prime minister of Iraq predicted, “There will be practically no Jewish survivors.” Cairo was filled with anti-Semitic posters “showing Arab soldiers shooting, crushing, mangling, and dismembering beared, hook-nosed Jews.”
Nor was this only rhetoric. Arab armies were massing along Israel’s border poised to strike. Egyptian battle plans included the massacre of the Tel Aviv civilian population. Palestinian plans included the destruction of Israel “and its inhabitants.” Israeli intelligence reported that the invading Egyptian army was equipped with “canisters of poison gas.” The only question was whether the Arab armies would be able to strike the first military blow. As Prime Minister Levi Eshkol told his cabinet on May 21, 1967, “The Egyptians plan to close the straits or to bomb the atomic reactor in Dimona. A general attack will follow. A war could ensue in which the first 5 minutes will be decisive. The question is who will attack the other’s airfields first.” After exhausting all diplomatic options and learning that Egypt was preparing an imminent attack and had flown surveillance flights over Israeli territory, the Israeli air force attacked Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi military airfields on the morning of June 5, 1967. Would any reasonable nation faced with comparable threats of annihilation have acted differently?
Israel did not attack Jordan, hoping it would stay out of the war, despite its treaty with Egypt sent several messages to King Hussein promising not to attack Jordan unless it was attacked first. Israel made it clear that it had no designs on the West Bank or even on the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, with its Western Wall, unless it were to be attacked. It was the Arab legion that initiated the hostilities between Jordan and Israel.
Jordan ignored Israel’s repeated peaceful overtures and began shelling Jewish civilian population centers in and around Israel’s major cities and suburbs. Six thousand shells were fired into Jewish residential areas, wounding 1,000 civilians, many of them seriously. 20 civilians were killed and 900 buildings were damaged. Long Tom guns targeted the suburbs of Tel Aviv, and Jordanian planes joined Syrian and Iraqi MIGs in bombing civilian population centers in cities, towns etc. Damascus Radio proudly reported, “The Syrian Air Force has begun to bomb Israeli cities.” It was a repeat of 1948, in which the Arab armies deliberately and unlawfully targeted Israeli civilian population centers, while the Israeli army attacked legitimate military targets.
Despite Jordan’s unprovoked attack against Israeli civilians, the Israeli army did not respond, hoping that Jordan would limit its military actions to a few opening salvos, but after Jordan sent its air force into the sky to bomb the residential neighborhoods of Netanya, Kfar Sirkin, and Kfar Saba, the Israeli air forces finally attacked Jordanian military airfields. The Israeli’s then accepted a cease-fire proposed by the U.N. chief observer, but the Jordanians fought on. Only then did Israel capture the West Bank and the Old City of Jerusalem–plainly in a defensive war against Jordan started by Jordan after Israel made it clear it wanted no military conflict with the Hashemite Kingdom.
The Six-Day War created yet another refugee problem, this one much easier to resolve in the context of a two-state solution. The 200,000 to 250,000 refugees who left Gaza and the West Bank following the Israeli occupation of those areas will surely have a right to return to those areas once a Palestinian state is established. (It will be interesting to see how many actually exercise that right, since the exercise of that right–unlike the claimed right of return to Israel-will have no major political or demographic effect on the Jewish state.) Most of the refugees left on their own accord.
In general, the casualties among civilians “were remarkably low” during the Six-Day War because Israel made sure that most of the fighting “took place far from major population centers”. Indeed, the major civilian casualties were inflicted by Arab mobs on innocent Jewish civilians in Arab cities that were not involved in the fighting. A summary:
“Mobs attacked Jewish neighborhoods in Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Morocco, burning synagogues and assaulting residents. A progrom in Tripoli, Libya, left 18 jews dead and 25 injured; the survivors were herded into detention centers. Of Egypt’s 4,000 Jews, 800 were arrested, including the chief rabbis of both Cairo and Alexandria, and their property sequestered by the government. The ancient communities of Damascus and Baghdad were placed under house arrest, their leaders imprisoned and fined. A total of 7,000 Jews were expelled, many with merely a satchel.”
This refugee problem has never been addressed by the international community. The other civilian casualties, as we have seen, were inflicted on Jewish residents of cities and towns that were targeted by Arab mortar shells. The tiny number of Arab civilian casualties was lower than in any comparable war in modern history–a fact never mentioned by those who accuse Israel of genocide or the indiscriminate killing of civilians. The major impact of the Six-Day War was the occupation itself.
The accusation is that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights following its victory in the Six-Day
War is without any justification.
The reality is that Israel was willing to trade land captured in a defensive war for peace, as it eventually did with the Egyptians and Jordanians, but neither the Palestinians nor the Syrians have been willing to offer peace in exchange for land, as required by Security Council Resolution 242.
